Stealing Wheels from the Van Man: R.A. Dickey has a Laugh at Spring Training

After seeing some tweets about R.A. Dickey stealing Daniel Norris' VW van and driving it around on the infield, I decided I needed to feature a Dickey card on my blog so I could talk about it. Norris is one of the Blue Jays' hot prospects, and he actually lives in the van behind a Wal-Mart store. It's his way of balancing out the millions of dollars and the fame. I hope he is able to keep whatever balance he needs to be successful. With Marcus Stroman's season-ending injury, their rotation will probably need the help. 

Stole Daniel norris' van and drove it on the infield.... Smooth ride but I need some power steering. #vwvansaresweet pic.twitter.com/9Xn7NjIhhg
— R.A. Dickey (@RADickey43) March 12, 2015

Yes. That's @RADickey43 whippin' the VW. pic.twitter.com/aCKt9kYKef
— Daniel Norris (@DanielNorris18) March 12, 2015

I feel like kind of a bandwagon guy, jumping on the Daniel Norris train now that he's got an ESPN article and a bunch of publicity. I guess every fandom has a start somewhere. He's got a few cards out there, mostly in the Bowman and Elite Extra Edition sets of the world. I imagine right now is the worst possible time to jump in on the guy, since the publicity is likely to have all the card-flippers coming out of the woodwork with their prospecting hats on.

At the other end of the career scale from Norris is R.A. Dickey, who has probably already had his best career year, a Cy Young-winning campaign in 2012. With him declining a bit since then and other players on his team rising, he hasn't been getting many slots in insert sets lately. From a budget standpoint that is good, but it certainly cuts down on the variety of Dickey cards out there to collect. I hadn't picked up one of these Silver Framed parallels yet when I snagged this one for a pretty decent price a while back. Then I pulled another one from a pack I bought at the LCS, so I went from 0 to 2 in a matter of weeks. This parallel from 2015 Topps Series 1 is numbered 15 / 20 and features what appears to be the front and back of a base card with the edges cut off and then glued into each side of a heavy silver frame. I like this photo because you can clearly see Dickey's grip on the pitch.

I usually run out of stuff to say by the time I get to this point. I root for a number of teams and the Blue Jays are one of them, along with the Astros and Athletics and a few others. I guess the Astros are my default favorite team, but I probably like more of the roster on the Blue Jays from an individual player perspective. I hope I am able to catch a few Dickey and Norris outings on TV this season. I am going to end up with that MLB.tv subscription. The only question is when I will break down and sign up.

May the Schwartz be with you!

There are some cards that you realize you need as soon as you see them. This is one of those cards for me. Somewhere in the past few months I read about an infamous error card in the 1977 Star Wars Series 4 set, on which protocol droid C-3PO is shown sporting what looks like a rather prominent golden erection. A card collection is a reflection of the collector, and my collection was incomplete without a good wiener joke to reflect my immature sense of humor.

There always seems to be a handful of these on eBay, and I bid on a lot of them over the last year or so without ever winning an auction. That finally came to an end recently, when I finally won a copy of the card that had eluded me for so long.

There are many theories floating around about what led to the error, such as a randy Topps airbrush artist, an inopportune trick of the light when the photo was taken, a broken-off piece of the costume captured on film in mid-air as it fell, or a government conspiracy to corrupt children. Either way, once the card hit the streets people complained about C-3PO's golden member, and the offending appendage was removed for future print runs. Neither card is particularly scarce, but demand seems to be consistently high for the error version. I guess there are a lot of collectors with a juvenile streak. I don't own a copy of the corrected card, but this is what it looks like:

BORING!

Now that I have a copy of this grail card, C-3PO can stand proudly as a central figure in my Star Wars card collection. Taking a page from San Jose Fuji's blogging style, I will end this post with a question.

Are there any wacky or off-the-wall cards you have specifically sought out for your collection?

N20 Allen & Ginter Prize & Game Chickens 10-13: Playing Chicken on eBay

1891 Allen & Ginter's Fifty Prize & Game Chickens: Creve-Coeur Hen, Gold-Laced Bantam, Guinea Fowl, and White Plymouth Rock

I have an eBay search set up for the Allen & Ginter Prize & Game Chickens set from the early 1890's, but most of the things that pop up are the same folks re-listing the same group of PSA-graded stuff over and over. Well, someone posted most of the set on there as singles with relatively low starting prices. I wanted to bid on the whole lot of them, but I restrained myself a little and bid on the six best-looking ones. I got outbid on two of those and wound up with these four cards. These are some nice-looking cards, with the birds featured up front and nice colorful scenes in the backgrounds. 

1891 Allen & Ginter's Fifty Prize & Game Chickens: Creve-Coeur Hen, Gold-Laced Bantam, Guinea Fowl, and White Plymouth Rock

The backs of these cards are pretty clean, without a lot of marking, stains, or paper loss. They are my first cards from this set that are not PSA-graded, so now I have a storage dilemma. I kind of like the look of the slabbed cards in this case, and I also like the protection the slabs afford to these 125-year old cards. Dropping or otherwise damaging any card feels bad, but I would feel especially bad if I were to hurt these cards after all the many things they've lived through.

2014 Panini Prizm R.A. Dickey Golden Leather Red Parallel

Yesterday I posted a red Panini Prizm basketball card numbered out of # / 25, so today I thought I would go with a red Panini Prizm baseball card numbered out of # / 25. It's like a theme week, except that it's only two days and not really that great of a theme.

The card itself is a Red parallel of the 2014 Panini Prizm Golden Leather insert, featuring R.A. Dickey. My copy is # 22 / 25. The set features players who have won awards for their defensive play. I already had the Blue version of this card, which is numbered out of # / 75. I may even have the base version, but I am not sure about that.

I am getting moderately excited for the upcoming baseball season. I'll probably be more excited when I finally talk myself into getting that MLB.tv subscription. Last year they did a half-price sale on Father's Day, but I don't know if I really want to wait until June for that. In other news, I pre-ordered a copy of Out of the Park Baseball 16, the super-deep baseball simulation game that will take over your whole life if you let it. It releases in a couple of weeks, but I will probably have to keep from downloading it until I finish school. The big change to the OOTP game this year is that they got the official MLB license and you won't have to jump through hoops and rely on aftermarket patches to get team logos and whatnot in the game.

And speaking of OOTP, David over at Tribecards is running his annual season-long pack-busting game with an affiliated OOTP league. It probably sounds more complex than it is. Basically, he opens a bunch of packs during the season and people in the game draft the players who appear on the cards. At the end of the season you get the cards of the players you drafted. The players you draft also get placed on your team in the OOTP league, and a season gets played out with these simulated rosters.

Last year my team didn't do very well. R.A. Dickey was one of my early picks and the virtual R.A. Dickey almost immediately went down with a season-ending injury. My pitching staff still wound up being okay, but I couldn't generate much on the offensive side. After picking a bunch of favorite players and dropping like a rock in the standings, I eventually turned to a complex system of setting up my draft list by calculating each available player's real-life WAR/year according to Baseball Reference and sorting them by that statistic for my lists. My team began to improve pretty rapidly after that, but the deficit in the standings was too much to overcome and I missed the playoffs.

2014-15 Panini Prizm Red Pulsar Gheorghe Muresan

It's kind of surprising to me that there are still cards being made of Gheorghe Muresan. He was a decent player who had a couple of good seasons, but most of his fame probably comes from his height. At 7' 7" he was one of the tallest players (along with Manute Bol) to play in the NBA. He also starred in a movie and some commercials. Whatever the reason for his lasting appeal (he retired 15 years ago), I am glad that there are still new Muresan cards for me to chase. I don't grab everything that pops up, but I try to snag a few new Muresan cards per year.

This is the 2014-15 Panini Prizm Red Pulsar parallel, numbered # 20 / 25. It was an eBay purchase a couple of months ago. There's quite a bit of red on this card, but it's shiny and pretty cool. Looking at NBA cards made by Panini gives you an idea of how much better the company's baseball products would be with an MLB license. The logos are important.

Danica Patrick Upper Deck 25th Silver Parallel 083 / 250

Way back in November I posted about a Danica Patrick card I picked up, from a 25th Anniversary set that Upper Deck put out as part of some promotion tied to purchasing certain products from them. In that post I mentioned that I'd seen a Silver parallel of the card during my searches, but hadn't yet been able to get one. Well, I got one. This card was actually purchased in November, but I've been sitting on a big stack of NASCAR posts for a while now. I've got close to 50 total posts sitting in my Drafts queue, and probably 15 of them are NASCAR-related. There isn't much difference between this card and the base card outside of a little different coloring on the border and the serial number stamped on the front. This one is copy # 083 / 250. There is an autographed version out there, too, but it costs a lot if you can even find one for sale.

Danica finished last week's race in 16th place after dodging some wrecks and whatnot, so that was decent. I actually got to see much of the race, as I remembered to turn on the TV in time. My boys had some fun watching it, with my oldest son admitting to his little brothers that even though he was sad to see the McDonald's car get smashed up, he kind of likes seeing the cars wreck into each other. It would be nice to have Dale Jr. win some races this year, and maybe even to have Danica grab a Top 5 finish and Josh Wise have a few better finishes. It'll be hard for him, though, as he's got a low-budget team and is usually a few laps down by mid-race.

Panini Gives Country Music a Chance

When I heard that Panini was putting out a set devoted to country music I was intrigued, hoping for a checklist full of the artists I'd grown up listening to. When the checklist released it kind of fit the bill, but also mixed in an awful lot of newer artists I'd never heard of. It also features a lot of the Hootie and the Blowfish guy. I nearly bought a pack of the stuff when I went into the Local Card Shop to buy some other things but he had only bought a couple of boxes and been surprised by the demand for them, and they had sold out.

In browsing the eBay listings I found one card that interested me, an auto/relic combination featuring Joe Diffie. I decided that instead of trying my luck with unopened product, I would just try to chase that card as a representative of the set for my collection. With the Buy It Now it could be had for about the price of a pack ($28 at the LCS), but I went bargain hunting to see if I could grab one for under $20. I couldn't. In spite of the fact that there are over 200 copies of the base version of this card, copies seem to be pretty scarce. I presume it's because most of the print run is sitting on dealer/distributor shelves.

Like most plans, mine did not survive contact with the enemy. I bid on a handful of base versions and they all went higher than I wanted to pay. Then I saw this card, which is some version of the Silhouette Prime Material Signatures card, maybe the Retail Green parallel. I'm not sure, but that's the only one on the official Excel file with a print run of 5. The Prime cards are similar to the Prime cards you find in sports cards, replacing a plain-colored swatch with one containing a patch or embroidered bit.

As you can probably guess, I emerged from the auction as the winning bidder, paying a bit more for the card than I would have for a base card, but getting a much more limited parallel with a cooler memorabilia piece embedded in exchange. I'll take it. My card is # 4 / 5 in the print run.